Every war has its heroes. Some of the heroes in this one are emerging far from the Persian Gulf action – at Guantanamo Bay, no less.

They are the half-dozen military lawyers assigned to defend the first Muslim prisoners who face trial as enemies of the United States. The defendants will have languished more than two years in a rudimentary prison arranged for them on the island of Cuba, awaiting formal charges without protection of the Geneva Conventions.

The U.S. Constitution, civil court procedures and a long established tradition of human rights also have questionable standing at Guantanamo.

Unprecedented? No, this is war. A military court will usually be closed to the public, often to the press as well. A defendant enjoys no right to face his accusers. The familiar rules on exculpatory evidence do not apply. (Example: Mary Surratt was hanged along with Lincoln's assassins in the absence of anyone's testimony that she knew what was being plotted in her boarding house.)

Recruiting defense lawyers for one of these tribunals – especially in the face of intense public feeling over terrorist atrocities – must be like picking a team of scrubs to scrimmage the varsity. Who'd volunteer to be kicked around?

Surprisingly, the coming Guantanamo trials have produced defense counsel who seem eager not only to take on the first team, but go after the head coaches and maybe the university president as well.

A good story line? Yes, but hey – should Americans care whether a decent defense is waged on behalf of those wretches?

Well, yes. It would not improve our standing before mankind if the place-name Guantanamo came to be linked in future legal annals with the Dreyfus Case, the Scottsboro Nine or poor old Tom Mooney in California. Whatever our hot-headed judgments of recent months, we cannot wish to see our nation's sense for justice equated with that of the Comintern and Third Reich.

Happily, the counselors-in-uniform now preparing to do battle are showing considerable moxie, plus legal skills far above what was expected of such selectees. It may not please the Pentagon – nor maybe even the White House – to find that getting the convictions they're hoping for will not be as easy as is usual in military courts.

Selection of the defense team was entrusted to a mid-career African-American, a Harvard-trained Air Force colonel, Will A. Gunn. Of rules that permit the tribunal to consider hearsay, unsworn allegations and other evidence unacceptable in civil courts, he says laconically: "If I were the person designing this system, I would have done it differently."

Nor is he satisfied with just a little complaining. In a brief already filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Gunn and his five Judge Advocate General lawyers are attacking the tribunals as inherently unfair, contrary to international law and – who'd have believed it? – susceptible to political influence. A section of their brief likens the president's role in all this to that of King George III in Revolutionary days.

Strong stuff, that – not the go-along compliance one associates with defense counsel whom military justice often makes its co-executioners.

What sort of material will Gunn's team offer?

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift is representing Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of complicity with Osama bin Laden. Fifteen interviews with his client, conducted through a qualified interpreter, have persuaded Swift that Hamdan took a job on bin Laden's Afghanistan farm, at the equivalent of $200 a month, solely to support his family in Yemen – and that the man knows nothing of terrorism.

"He has two beautiful kids – one's 4, one's 2," says this clearly concerned lawyer. "Locked up here more than two years, he's never even seen the younger child."

Another probable defendant in the coming trials is David Hicks, an Australian citizen arrested in Afghanistan as a member of the fundamentalist Taliban. His appointed counsel, Marine Maj. Michael Mori, argues the impropriety of trying a foreigner before a court deemed unfit for U.S. civilians.

The zeal shown by Colonel Gunn's team impresses human rights organizations. Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal, whose help was sought in preparing the Supreme Court brief, told The Wall Street Journal: "I was shocked to discover just how good these military lawyers are."